How to give and receive feedback from students about learning.

There is no simple answer to planning great feedback that allows your students to thrive. It is as complex as they are. I am at pains to point out that what I am about to outline is far from a complete set of ideas, but the following list may act as focusing lens to help sharpen what you see as important for the lesson you are currently planning. The culture of the classroom and the institution’s, your and your students’ perceptions are very much front and centre in the realms of feedback, so we will start with that.

Developing a culture where feedback is valued, wanted and well received?

• What routines, systems and procedures do you use to ensure that ‘threat’ is reduced and feedback will not be interpreted as a personal affront?
• What have you done to help students understand that feedback is part of the learning process?
• Do you use self and peer assessment strategies to develop student error detection and self-regulation?
• How do you value honest student responses so that errors are readily offered?

6 steps to planning receiving feedback from students.

Step 1 - Remind yourself of the lon learning intentions?

What was important last lesson?

What is important in this lesson?

What will be important next lesson?

What will be important at the end of the academic year?

Is this a threshold concept?

Step 2 - Where is the best place to focus the assessment?

Are you working on a long-term outcome that brings together many ideas and involves more complex thinking?

Are you working on short-term outcomes so repeating the information is key to longer-term learning?

What are the misconceptions, known difficulties and common errors associated with this concept or this task?

Step 3 - What exactly are you looking for?

How important is the idea? Is it a threshold concept? A known concept? A Long term learning intention?

How might student knowledge change over time or over the teaching sequence?

How will you know if the students are getting to grips with this idea? How might this change as they become more confident or understand it better?

Are you looking to see if they understand the idea, if they know the idea or that they can apply the idea?

Step 4 - Constructively align tasks and assessments.

Are you interested in them developing or constructing meaning of the idea or assessing if this has been learned?

Is there any chance for means end thinking or guess work?

Step 5 - Design assessments that you can trust.

Have I assessed the big idea more than once?

How big is the decision I will make based upon this information?

How much trust is necessary?

Do I trust that they know it? Or have they just worked it out from the clues in the assessment?

Step 6 - Make the information manageable.

When do I need this information? Can it wait for in between lessons to be processed and used?

Will sampling the class suffice?

Does having a valid assessment matter at this point in time?

How does the gathering of information fit with the flow of planned activities/ learning or the lesson?

Can a computer do the compilation of the evidence for me?

8 steps to giving students feedback.

Step 1 - Establishing the purpose of the feedback.

• Are students developing an understanding? Applying or building on knowledge? Producing work where quality matters? (Are domain skills involved)? Are they struggle to complete a task?
• Is there an opportunity to develop their self-regulation?
• Who or what is the feedback for? The student? To fulfil a policy? For observers?

Step 2 - Consider the form of feedback (or if more Instruction is needed?)

• Do students know enough for the feedback to be helpful?
• Are the tasks constructively aligned enough for task level feedback to be helpful?
• Are answer sheets, guide sheets or rubrics needed?
• Will marking codes be a useful time saver?

Step 3 - Establish a context for feedback.

• How does the teaching sequence support the current learning?
• What prior knowledge do they need to be able to act on the feedback given?
• Are the learning intentions shared, agreed or owned by the students?
• How can you make the goals clear to the students?
• Is exemplar work used to set the direction and quality of the student work?
• Is a rubric established early in the sequence of producing the work?
• Is there a way of making the feedback something that is sought by the students rather than offered by the teacher?

Step 4 - Consider the timing of the feedback.

• Is the potential feedback needed for this task or concept best if provided immediately during the activity, or might some delay be beneficial?
• Is the task best defined as a construct, demonstrate or assessment task?
• How would testing and tests be structured in this topic to aid long term retention?

Step 5 - Establish the correctness, or not, of the student learning?

• What are the signs, evidence and clues that this piece of work is on the right track?
• Is there a hinge point opportunity?
• Is the hinge point activity robust enough to exposure misunderstandings and gaps in understanding?

Step 6 - Consider how the feedback will induce thinking.

• How does the feedback narrow down the range of potential answers or solutions?
• Does the feedback avoid leading the student to use a means end or a ‘trial and error’ approach?
• What are the purposes of your planned questions? Are they to assess, to induce thinking or a convoluted form of social control?
• Is there an opportunity for students to ask high quality questions?

Step 7 - Consider how the feedback develops self-regulation.

• Is student knowledge secure enough to add potential extraneous cognitive load?
• What is the balance between securing knowledge and developing self-regulation?
• Is there a choice of meaningful tasks to follow formative assessment?

Step 8 - Set targets.

• What might you have to re-teach? How will you represent the ideas differently?
• What are the long-term goals for students with this concept?
• Is there any opportunity for “feed-forward” between tasks?
• Do some targets take precedence over other?

Further Reading

Nicol and Macfarlane Dick https://www.reap.ac.uk/reap/public/Papers/DN_SHE_Final.pdf

Hattie and Timperley http://www.columbia.edu/~mvp19/ETF/Feedback.pdf

Teacher clarity: Don’t be vague.

Don’t be vague, is a pretty vague way of saying how to improve teacher clarity, but it is not without validity. Unclear language, in explanations, has a negative effect upon student learning (Hargie 2006). 

Given the amount of talk teachers do it is inevitable that vagueness will occur to a certain extent,. It only becomes a problem  when teacher explanations have excessive amounts of vagueness (in excess of 7.2 vagueness terms per minute). At this point student achievement and perception of clarity in the lesson are negatively affected.  Errors are more common than we think, with an average of from three to five vagueness terms per minute of teacher talk, and an average of four word mazes per minute of teacher talk. (Snyder 1991)

Vagueness can be located in the two facets of teacher talk: What is said, and , how it is said. 


The following table categorises vague terms and teacher errors made during presentation or explanations, not as a checklist to plan what to say, but more as a way of focusing where professional learning might be most useful. The signs are that even a narrow focus on one aspect can have a positive influence on teacher clarity.(Smith 1982)

What.

Vagueness terminology	Teachers may...	Examples of terminology
Using approximation with setting definitions or with quantities.	Lack specificity in what is communicated. Not set clear boundaries of where rules apply.	Other people, somewhere, under certain conditions. pretty much, nearly, almost, sort of. A bunch of, most of, a couple, some.
Bluffing phrase that make uncertain things sound certain.	Lack sufficient PCK. Be ill prepared for a complex explanation.	Actually, and so forth, anyway, or As a matter of fact: Of course...
When we describe possibility. or When a negation evades a clear response.	Indicate a lack of clarity or lack of definite knowledge. lead to reduced student confidence in teacher.	Maybe, might, could be, Chances are, Perhaps or not always, not quite, isn’t necessarily
When a multiple ideas are needed at once.	May gloss over complexity	aspects, types, lots, factors, kinds or Generally, often, probably, Ordinarily
Anaphora	Use excessive pronouns rather than a direct reference to the content. This may make the explanation more difficult to follow.	I, she, he, the former, the latter, them.

How.

During explanations, novice learners can be distracted by accidental teacher word mazes. Student can get lost, and miss the point we are trying to make in the twists and turns of what is said. This can be as simple as repeating a phrase, repeating a phrase, that can then disjoint, can then disjoint, the meaning of the sentence. (You see what I did there)

Presentational Vagueness	Teachers may...	Examples
Recovering	Lose track of where the explanation is heading.	Anyway, to cut a long story short, you know, do you understand?
Admission of Error	break fluency reduce student confidence	I guess.., I’m sorry, Excuse my mistake, I don’t know
Utterances such as vocal fillers	break fluency making it more difficult to follow the ideas.	Urn, Err, Basically, Em. Look, Right, Well and stuff.
Word mazes that confuse the meaning of your statements.	make a false start to an explanation. not make sense halt in speech	Repeating phrases,
Improper pacing occurs	speak too quickly or do not allow sufficient time for students to process information.	The last five minutes of the lesson and you realise you have not explained something...
Express our reservations	lead to doubt of a point of view or fact. lead to student being less likely to accept the information as helpful.	apparently, appears, relatively, seems

To reduce our, unintended, vagueness is once more about professional learning. As Smith concludes:  

“Teachers can be trained to significantly reduce the frequencies of vagueness terms they use. Such training involves intense focus on vagueness terms per se and on preparation of lessons to eliminate vagueness terms. Interestingly, it appears that teachers can reduce mazes by-simply presenting lessons and reviewing their presentations.” 

Metacognitive Wrappers

Metacognitive wrappers on Prezi

All a metacognitive wrapper is a task that is completed at the beginning and at the end of an activity or lesson, that is designed to help students plan or at the very least consider their thinking over a lesson. The positioning of these tasks is importan, firstly the integration of teaching thinking skills in real content is well documented in John Hattie's Visible Learning. He also highlights a couple of studies that back up the wrapper nature. Lavery states that strategies aimed at forethought and that encourage evaluation have the biggest impacts on learning. While Huang when studying the metacognitive behaviour of self questioning measured the biggest effect before the lesson, and slightly lower after the lesson. It was much lower during the lesson. Common sense would suggest that trying to be self questioning during a lesson could be distracting to all but the most able learners.

I always field a few responses and record them on the board, and thereby make their thinking visisble. There is no need to sanction any responses as right or wrong at this point. I stumbled across these a while back, and instantly saw their use in engagement and in the development of true metacognition. It is essential that student metacognition goes beyond just thinking about their thinking and actually facilitates them being able to control their thinking.

So what prompts or questions are useful, through trial and error I arrived at the kinds of things to ask, and have recently began to discover the research that explains why this strategy works. I always make a point of making it absolutely clear what they are about to learn. This gives the gives the scope to ask something about what they might already know? I purposefully leave it as might as this makes all ideas to be valid, at least at the beginning of a session. I think it is important not to close any thinking avenues in the first five minutes of a lesson! It also gives students the chance to come back to their original ideas at the end and see if it has changed, have they added new knowledge, modified an existing idea or become more confident about what they knew. (Although becoming less confident in their knowledge is just as valid a response, as they could either be unlearning a misconception, which is a difficult process or be questioning why they believe something rather just accepting something is right.)

The phrasing of the questions is vital, it must embody the kind of thinking you require of them and phrased in such away that its sounds mutable or learnable. So adding phrases like at this point in time or today, are useful signals.

The next element is a target setting one that could be the visualisation of a success criteria, the setting of a self reward for success (could this be a way of tapping into the intrinsic learner motivation? Findlay and Cooper demonstrated that those students who are internally motivated perform better than those who delegate this responsibility). This element could equally be determined by the usefulness of what is being is learned.

Strategic thinking is an essential part, helping students structure not only their thinking but their work too. So getting students to plan out a step by step method on how to solve a problem or planning out an assignment are two of the top four in Hattie's list of most effective metacognitive strategies. In fact a properly planned wrapper will hit all four.

The final element to a wrapper is to focus on a learner attribute such as motivation or being resourceful in their learning is probably the quickest win for the students and for the teacher . Even if at the begin if they say "I'm not motivated today " they have already engaged in the type of thinking you require. I have been surprised by the consistency of improvement at the end of each session when returning to this question. By indicating these attributes within a specific learning activity adds importance to them and makes them visible. It makes them metacognitive.

So to conclude, learners must return to the task, I change the tense to things like Was the knowledge you had useful, or did your plan help you structure your work etc and I again discuss their responses, looking for and praising them controlling their thinking or changing their mind. As change is learning.

The Hidden Lives Of Learners

These are the slides I used during my TeachMeet NorthEast Presentation on Graham Nuthalls work.
On the surface Nuthalls work is very simple. He assessed prior learning, wired each student and teacher for sound, used classroom observers to note interactions and resources, assessed again, interviewed learners about their learning experiences and finally correlated learning with this data. But what you get is so much more. An inspiring synthesis of the hidden lives of learners!. Even the methodology employed has a useful message for teachers, we must listen and look out for the learning that is taking place.

Hidden lives of learners from DKMead

The concept of the three worlds that a learner exists in is instantly a useful planning and reflective tool for teachers. Another neat way of thing about it is Pam Hook's question "What is happening at the ampersand?" This book gets to the heart of the confluence between teaching and learning.

The question posed is illustrative (but not definitive) of how messy the business of learning is. The first posing is difficult unless you know the answer. The second is easier by virtue of your prior learning. This allowed you to deduce what the answer is, but not that you have learned anything!
Students learn what they do.

Consider the amount of learning forgotten by students, especially that crammed for an exam. Nuthall makes clear that students do not become content experts but experts in classroom procedures that is imprinted upon them lesson after lesson, day after day.

So when it comes to seeing learning teacher and students can find it difficult. In fact Nuthall makes it clear that when asked what learning looks like teachers describe good behaviour, not even learner behaviours as opposed to seeing the process of learning. The next few slides prove that I too have failed to see the dichotomy. I have blogged about this previously. Fortunately my PEEL Good learner behaviours display rescues me intermittently.

Three exposures

The seemingly random picture of the Queen, an anagram and a choice of number. Is used to demonstrate a key finding of Nuthalls work. Students need 3 or 4 different exposures to a fact in order to commit it to their working memory. This is the second exposure to the content to be learned from the questions asked earlier.

Evidence

The first of the graphs (slide 26) see the students increase in ability from left to right. It is unsurprising to see the more able students be more successful in a module of work than the weaker ones. This is typical. What is a little surprising is the influence of prior learning. The more able arrive already knowing more, and this is the sole difference in their success. The amount of learning by all students is equivocal, independent of ability. This probably explains why Finland's schools are considered so successful. This is the reason I celebrate performance against target, rather than "grade" with my students. Again I have blogged on this.

The graph on slide 28, is a source of comfort for teachers, and again typical. It highlights that the majority of the learning in the class has come either directly or indirectly form the teacher. The weaker students are more reliant upon the teacher than the more able, and are more reliant upon direct teacher input. A clear call to arms for effective differentiation if there ever was one! It is also important to note that the learning from the choice of teacher designed activities, will also be influenced by the peer culture and social status systems our students construct in and out side of school. On top of this,there is still a significant amount of learning that is self or peer derived. hence the warning from Hattie! Students require training and structures in giving effective feedback.

The one that I do not know

Is a quote from one one of my students, directed at his peers, who persistently ignored him.I intervened and was lucky in my timing in two ways. One that I overheard his plea, but also in that my lesson plan, the ensuing conversation that we had was the third exposure to the information he was struggling with. Now, he knows the what he doesn't know, and when asked the content and the action of learning are linked. So, when I ask whats the one that you don't know he replies "condensation!", the right answer.

The table shows the frighteningly uniqueness of learning. The numbers in the final column, ranging from 44- 89% are the amount of learning that is exclusive to one or one and a single other student. This too is independent of ability. I have not yet assimilated this into my pedagogy, as fully as I expect we can, but I do engage level ladders with a range of suggestive ability indicators. I annotate these with code, for every students, sampling them frequently. So BM is book marking. MMT a mid module test, TQ a teacher question etc. i revisit them when I am unconvinced that a student has not learned them. This way I can (crudely) track the learning taking place.

Finally the ISBN, and the forth and final exposure to the previous answer. The Hidden Lives of Learners. Read it, Think about, Reflect upon your practice, but most of all enjoy it.